Article was found at the BFTC website."DON'T THINK, BUT
OBSERVE:"WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WORK OF LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN FOR
SOLUTION-FOCUSED BRIEF THERAPY?

By Steve de Shazer

Understandably, I have often
been asked about my interest in and frequent citation of Wittgenstein's work in
both my writing and my training seminars. Since I maintain that SFBT is a
practice or activity that is without an underlying (grand) theory, it seems at
least strange if not contradictory to refer over and over to a philosopher's
work. This mistakenly leads some readers and seminar participants to the idea
that Wittgenstein's work might actually provide the (missing) theory. However,
as they quickly discover, if they are looking for a philosophical system or
theory, reading Wittgenstein is at least disconcerting and confusing since he
does not provide such a system or theory. Rather, his work is "non-systematic,
rambling, digressive, discontinuous, interrupted thematically and marked by
rapid transitions from one subject to another" (Stroll, p. 93). This means that
the reader has to work hard to follow the criss-crossing of the various threads
of the argument. Wittgenstein deliberately uses this approach in very subversive
and strategic ways designed to make the reader look again and thus think
in new and different ways.

It might not be overstating
things to call Wittgenstein the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.
(His work is certainly different from that of any other philosopher.) Many
people inside and outside the field of philosophy have given him the label of
"genius," starting with Bertrand Russell. For instance Stroll (2002), who calls
him "the greatest modern philosopher," says that

the later Wittgenstein stands at
the end and outside of that [philosophical] tradition and can be thought of as
turning it on its head. The tradition sees the ordinary person as confused and
in need of philosophical therapy. Socrates is the paradigmatic philosopher on
this view. He walked around Athens questioning his fellow citizens and quickly
exposed the shallowness and inconsistencies of the thinking about fundamental
issues. For Wittgenstein the emphasis is in the other direction. It is
philosophers like Socrates and his successors who "tend to cast up a dust and
then complain they cannot see" and who need help (p. 5).

Philosophy, from its very
start over 2000 years ago has focused on the perplexity and complexity of the
individual, seeking insight into and understanding of the individual person and
his or her inner processes and states. Philosophers sought the essence of the
thing — "thought," "knowledge," "being," "object," "time," "I," "name," etc.
Psychology, a relatively recent offshoot of philosophy, has continued this focus
on the individual's mind, emotions, and behavior. Psychology, and its "cousin"
psychiatry, has worked to understand what inside the troubled individual has
gone wrong - diagnosis - and how to fix it. Wittgenstein, talking about
classifications (like diagnosis) in general, remarked that:

The classifications made by
philosophers and psychologists are like those that someone would give who tried
to classify clouds by their shape (PR #154).

Wittgenstein looked at
traditional philosophy's project in quite a different way:

When philosophers use a
word — "knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name" — and try to
grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever
actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original
home?

What we do is to bring
words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use (PI
#116).

For Wittgenstein, "everyday
use" is the bedrock of his activity, his practice as a philosopher. For
instance, he offers this approach to a traditional, philosophical puzzle:

Compare knowing and
saying: how many feet high Mont Blanc is —how the word "game" is
used —how a clarinet sounds. If you are surprised that one can know
something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the
first. Certainly not of one like the third (PI #78).

Clearly, the various uses of
the words "knowing" and "saying" are striking and obvious. The difficulty arises
when we start to think that words carry their meaning around with them rather
than seeing that meaning arises out of use. That is, knowing how a clarinet
sounds and knowing the height of Mont Blanc are two very different uses of the
word "knowing." And saying what you know in each case is a very different kind
of activity. There is nothing mysterious here. We were all trained to use these
words and we would not expect ourselves or anyone else to be able to say how a
clarinet sounds. The mystery developed because philosophers traditionally wanted
to find the essence of "knowing" and "saying" and therefore became confused when
the words were removed from the contexts in which they normally are used.

In the course of his
work, Wittgenstein seems to have had various targets in mind: "nearly all the
major problems of traditional philosophy - change, universals, abstract ideas,
skepticism, meaning, reference, and mind - derive from the thought of Plato and
Descartes" (Stroll, p. 105) as well as Kant and Wittgenstein's own early work.
As Williams (2002) puts it:

For Descartes, both
immediacy and intentionality are explained in terms of the special infallible
knowledge that the thinker has of the contents of his own mind. This
epistemological mark of the mental privileges the subjective over the public
and/or social as the starting place for language, belief, and knowledge
(Williams, p. 2).

This individualistic
point of view, with the individual having a special, infallible knowledge of the
contents of his or her own mind, is essential to traditional psychology and
psychiatry. Furthermore,

Wittgenstein is fundamentally
opposed to the picture of mind according to which experience or knowledge is
some kind of amalgam of given sensory data and active mental construction and
operation. Wittgenstein repudiates the metaphysics of both a Cartesian and a
Kantian variety. Grammar, rules, concepts are not the apriori
metaphysical or epistemological conditions for the possibility of experience,
judgment, and action. Grammatical propositions, rules, and concepts can be
abstracted from our ongoing practices, from our language games, but they do not
ground those games (Williams, pp. 3-4).

What Wittgenstein calls
"language-games" can be simply described as slices of everyday life, the home
base of words and concepts. He describes language games "in three ways: As a
methodological tool in examining philosophical theories, as akin to the way in
which children learn [training], and as an explanatory device describing
language use in relation to other forms of acting" (Williams, p. 220). These are
the everyday practices and activities in which words are used which provide
words with their meanings. Wittgenstein lists several as examples within his
definition of the term:

The term
"language-game" is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the
speaking of a language is part of an activity, or of a form of
life.

Review the
multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in
others:

Giving orders, and obeying them —
Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements
—Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) —Reporting an
event —Speculating about an event —Forming and testing an hypothesis
—Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams —Making
up a story; and reading it —Play-acting —Singing catches —Guessing
riddles —Making a joke; telling it —Solving a problem in practical
arithmetic —Translating from one language to another —Asking, thanking,
cursing, greeting, praying (PI #23).

As Wittgenstein points out
over and over, the everyday use of words is a social, interactional,
activity1.

For most of the 20th
century the concepts of traditional psycho-therapy were, and continue to be,
firmly within the traditional philosophical framework. For instance, emotions
were seen as something inside the individual. Sometimes these emotions were seen
as triggering, perhaps even causing, an individual's behavior. (Certainly all of
us at times use our emotions as a providing a reason for doing what we did; this
is a normal way of talking.) Thus the psycho-therapeutic emphasis on the
individual's controlling or managing his or her emotions.

Such mental-process
accounts draw on certain misconceived propositions, such as sensations are
private, acts of imagination are voluntary, people act on their intentions and
beliefs, and so on. The propositions are misconceived, according to
Wittgenstein, because they are taken as empirical claims describing interior
states and causes of behavior. In fact, their status as grammatical propositions
reveals them to be norms of our psychological language games. They are
propositions like "The bishop in a game of chess moves diagonally." This
proposition expresses a rule of the game, not an empirical claim about how
bishop-shaped figurines move in the world. Sometimes they roll off the table
(Williams, p. 10).

Wittgenstein sees
emotions in a very different way. For instance, he would point to the context in
which an individual experience the emotion. He would remind us that in our
ordinary use of these words, "anger," "fear," "anxiety," "better," "depressed,"
etc. there are other people involved and that whatever happened both before and
after have something to do with the emotion we felt. That is, the emotion,
"anger," "better," "depressed," etc., cannot be understood when it is cut off
from the context which is its home; doing so makes the emotion into something
mysterious and separate from everyday life.

Of course, as
Wittgenstein would point out, this is something we already know but the
traditional world-view (inevitably based in large part on traditional philosophy
and psychology) confuses us and gives us the urge to want to dig deeper and see
what lies behind and beneath: to understand the essence of "better" or "anger."
We automatically forget the context of everyday life and are puzzled. Thus
Wittgenstein saw his job — at least in part — as providing us with reminders of
what we already know.

For Wittgenstein, any
and all inner-processes and states, such as feeling angry, feeling better,
thinking, etc. are connected to and — at least in part — defined by some outside
context.

Psychological verbs [are]
characterized by the fact that the third person of the present is to be verified
by observation, the first person not.

Sentences in the third
person of the present: information. In the first person present:
expression.

The first person of
the present akin to an expression (Z #472). That is, if an individual says "I
feel depressed" this is an expression of his emotional or feeling state and is
similar to an exclamation such as "ouch." It is not an empirical statement. It
is not as if he or she were reporting on his own observation of himself. It is
not a statement of knowledge. Since the first person present is not a report
about something he knows about himself but is just an expression, he cannot be
wrong about it. Of course, since he cannot be wrong, he also cannot be right. It
is just an exclamation.

However, when we say
"He is depressed" we are reporting on our observations — which again points to
the context: we see him behaving in ways similar to how we saw other people
behave who said they were depressed. Of course we could be wrong and only he can
confirm or disconfirm our observation.

Wittgenstein's way of
describing things reminds us to observe what is going on and reminds us to look
at everyday life — including language as it is actually used — as the home of
our concepts and descriptions. It is these descriptions of everyday life that
replace the explanations and theories of traditional philosophy and
psychology.

1"Commanding, questioning, recounting,
chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating,
drinking, playing" (PI #25).